Never ever any jail time. 

Denmark’s largest bank Danske bank pleaded guilty to bank fraud and agreed to forfeit $2 billion (€1.88 billion) after it admitted defrauding American banks between 2008 and 2016 by allowing, through its Estonia branch, access to US banks for high-risk customers who were neither Estonian nor residents of Estonia, including some in Russia.

Suspicious transactions worth some €200 billion ($212 billion) were made during that period from the accounts of 15,000 non-resident clients, according to a 2018 internal report. The bank said it was unable to determine where the money came from, noting that some 23% of incoming funds were received from Russia. Prosecutors accused the bank’s Estonia branch of luring clients by promises of large transfers with little oversight. The Justice Department added that the bank’s employees also concealed the nature of the illicit transactions by utilizing shell companies to hide the funds’ ownership.

US: Danish Danske bank pleads guilty in fraud case – DW – 12/13/2022

Capital Gains?

The great dictator, being dictated to

By his own inner voice and ambition,

Declares his is a patriotic mission,

Insists what’s obviously a lie is true;

Dismisses any humane intrusions.

All those who stand hand on heart and salute

The flag, and do nothing to refute,

At least to themselves, such dire delusions,

Are as prisoners locking their own cell doors.

Such a loss leader, who cannot be wrong

Will slaughter others and his own young

By conducting his self-justified wars.

From his seat of power, rules without pity,

Isolated in his capital city.

D. A.

 While Rishi Sunak wallowed in the praise of his fellow Tories for reinforcing the hostile environment towards migrants crossing the Channel, news is breaking of a boat tragedy. The number of deaths has not been ascertained as yet.  

Suella Braverman was quick to express her sorrow and shed her crocodile tears, ignoring the fact that it has been UK policy which has led to people risking their lives to reach the UK so to be able to lodge asylum claims.

 While Rishi Sunak wallowed in the praise of his fellow Tories for reinforcing the hostile environment towards migrants crossing the Channel, news is breaking of a boat tragedy. The number of deaths has not been ascertained as yet.  

Suella Braverman was quick to express her sorrow and shed her crocodile tears, ignoring the fact that it has been UK policy which has led to people risking their lives to reach the UK so to be able to lodge asylum claims.

 Back in the Sixties, and beyond, there was a popular Pete Seegar protest song: Where Have All The Flowers Gone. It contains the line: ‘Oh, When will you ever learn?

Oh, When will you ever learn?’ The double question expressing exasperation at the senseless deaths of young men in senseless conflicts.

If the report, quoted by RT, but taken from The Times, is correct then Marx’s adage about history repeating itself, but the second time as farce, begins not to look applicable in this instance. Five will get you ten that there are ‘advisers’ from one or more states with a geo-political interest in sustaining this particular conflict embedded in Ukraine.

Wars are not the business of the working class; the effects falling most heavily upon them.

Neither is supporting the interests of the capitalist class the business of the working class.

Time to start supporting yourselves.

“British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan has admitted, according to a report in The Times on Tuesday.

Russia has consistently warned that NATO troops have been active in the conflict, but these statements have been dismissed by Western analysts and media.

Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal, The Globe and Laurel, the newspaper said.

These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated. 

While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”

Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. “There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine,” Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. “Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks.”

Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.”

RT 13/12/22

Dave C.

 A government-commissioned report by the King’s Fund health thinktank says years of denying funding to the health service and failing to address its growing workforce crisis have left it with too few staff, too little equipment and too many outdated buildings to perform the amount of surgery needed.

A “decade of neglect” by successive Conservative administrations has weakened the NHS to the point that it will not be able to tackle the 7 million-strong backlog of care the report concluded. 

One of the experts consulted, said: “We have essentially had 10 years of managed decline. This is not a Covid problem. This is an austerity problem.”

“Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect,” said the King’s Fund chief executive, Richard Murray. “The sporadic injections of cash during the austerity years after 2010 were at best meant to cover [the service’s] day-to-day running costs. This dearth of long-term investment has led to a health and care system hamstrung by a lack of staff and equipment and crumbling buildings. These critical challenges have been obvious for years.”

He continued, “The NHS in 2022 faces many of the same challenges it faced in 2000: unacceptably long waiting times and a service hobbled by staff shortages. To that is now added a cost of living crisis, industrial action by staff and a backdrop of a weak economy and weak public finances.”

The promises made earlier this year in NHS England’s “elective recovery plan” are highly unlikely to be met. They included pledges to end waits of two years, 18 months and one year by the summer, next spring and 2025 respectively.

Decade of neglect means NHS unable to tackle care backlog, report says | NHS | The Guardian

Thirty million people in the UK will be unable to afford what the public considers to be a decent standard of living by 2024, according to a study from the New Economics Foundation. 

The thinktank said rising prices, below-inflation increases in earnings and projected increases in unemployment would result in 43% of households lacking the resources to put food on the table, buy new clothes or treat themselves and their families – a 12 percentage point rise compared with 2019.

The NEF said its calculation that by 2024 almost 90% of single parents and 50% of workers with children would fall below a minimum income standard.

Sam Tims, economist at the New Economics Foundation, said: “A decade of cuts, freezes, caps and haphazard migration between systems has left the UK with one of the weakest safety nets among developed countries. Millions of families were already living in avoidable deprivation and hardship but as we enter the greatest living standards crisis on modern records, the day-to-day experience of low-income families is set to become even more desperate.”

30 million in UK ‘priced out of decent standard of living by 2024’ | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Asbestos is banned in 70 countries which have deemed that this construction material is a “silent killer” since its fibres are carcinogenic.

According to the World Health Organization, all types of asbestos cause “lung cancer, mesothelioma, cancer of the larynx and ovary, and asbestosis [fibrosis of the lungs]”. Exposure to the fibres and handling or inhaling them could also result in death.

In 2011, India banned asbestos mining and asbestos waste used in ships. But it continues to trade in raw asbestos and asbestos-based products, commonly found in the roofs of houses, especially in poorer regions of the country.

Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and head of Small World Sustainability, a consultancy, said that trade goes on because commercial interests have been prioritised over human welfare.

According to a November 2021 report by the Indian government, between 2019 and 2020, India imported 361,164 tonnes of asbestos, a 1 percent decrease compared with 364,105 tonnes in the previous year.

The report noted that almost the entire import was chrysotile asbestos, with 85 percent of these fibres coming from Russia. About 3 percent also came from Brazil, Kazakhstan and Hungary each, and 2 percent came from Poland and South Africa respectively.

India also exports asbestos. The Indian government’s November 2021 report noted that most of the exports went to Bangladesh, and 7 percent to Sri Lanka.

Gopal Krishna, an environmental lawyer and co-founder of the Ban Asbestos Network of India, explained:

 “The trade continues because nobody in India has time to deal with health complaints when money is involved and there is a lewd relationship between the Indian government and the asbestos manufacturers in the country…The Indian government is aware of the harmful impacts of asbestos, but is heavily influenced by the profit-inducing capacity of the industry…” He added, “These business enterprises don’t operate on logic. They operate on profit.”

Why does India still use and trade asbestos? | Health News | Al Jazeera

More than 11,000 children are known to have been killed or maimed in Yemen’s civil war since it escalated nearly eight years ago.

“The true toll of this conflict is likely to be far higher,” said the children’s agency UNICEF “Thousands of children have lost their lives, hundreds of thousands more remain at risk of death from preventable disease or starvation.”

 2.2 million Yemeni children are acutely malnourished, one-quarter of them aged under five, and most are at extreme risk from cholera, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, UNICEF said.

UN report: More than 11,000 children killed or maimed in Yemen civil war (france24.com)

 From mid-2019 to the end of 2020, U.S. wealth grew by about $20 trillion. 

The richest 10% (who are roughly speaking America’s millionaires) took $15 trillion of that.

The average millionaire in America gained about $600,000 during that year and a half. 

The “poorest millionaires” gained about $200,000. The 25,000 very richest Americans (the .01%) each took an estimated $80 million during that time.

According to Americans for Tax Fairness and IRS data, over a recent five-year span the 25 wealthiest billionaires paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 3.4% when their wealth growth is counted as income. 

Meanwhile, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers was 13.3% in 2019.